I'm forwarding this video to the CEO of a company I have been working with because I have been pushing social media linking and customer reviews at the product level forever as link magnets. It's defintely been a struggle to get these accepted, despite the obvious example of Amazon.com.

Yep, the company I work with had played with nofollow about the time Matt said the change went into effect a year ago. Now I see why there was very little evidence that the sculpting was working.

Currently the site has few internal links nofollowed and my tendency is to wait for now. No more nofollow attributes will be added and as time goes by, some might be removed from internal links to allow free flow of link juice within the site.

However, we did implement nofollow links on image links that had a corresponding text link on the page. Not sure whether to remove thos at this point or not.

Interesting how Google kept pushing nofollow and javascript links for paid links and yanked them both out from under us.

Thanks. So, you are suggesting just having two links, one an image and one text, both pointing to the same URL? I would think that you would want to be sure the text link got the credit. Some folks seem to think that the first link the spiders find is counted and the second link to the same URL is discarded. In this example, the image link would be crawled first.

Also, would that mean that if you had 50 images on the page with 50 corresponding text links that the link juice is divided by 100 or are the duplicate links ignored?

I'm going to basically repeat what Case brought up because I don't see an answer.

Let's say you have an image that is linked and a text link beneath it both going to the same URL. Previously, I would have said to nofollow the image link to give the text link the credit. Sounds to me like now, the better option is not to link the image at all or to turn that link into a format that Google doesn't see as a link (Flash, external javascript, etc.).

As an old school SEO, I never stopped using the meta keyword tag. I knew it didn't count for much, but figured it couldn't hurt. Guess I was right.

I had heard (I think at Pubcon Austin) about the ALT attribute taking on renewed perceived weight. Again, I have always been a proponent of using it (to the point of some heated arguments with other SEOs who thought the ALT attribute was useless for SEO).

Now, if I can just convince my clients that keyword stuffing the ALT is a big no-no!

Great post. I know from experience with real estate clients that it is a highly competitive business and they will do just about whatever it takes to get an edge in the rankings. When I was doing web design I'd have them come in with all kinds of requests including link spamming.

I think I'll bookmark this post for future reference and to show the next agent who comes in wanting to rank #1 for "fill-in-the-city real estate".